I think I'm with Bob on this. Nowadays, for colour print work, which is mainly family stuff and some community organisation record shots, I will have the films developed and scanned to CD at my local Frontier lab. These are quite good enough for small prints and use in local newspapers and other publications (City newsletters, etc.) where the reproduction ratio is often less than 1:1. If I need a larger print, or a copy for, for example, the PUG, I can do it easily enough from the original scan, or, for better quality, I'll scan it again at a higher resolution and do the tweaking in Photoshop to get the exact result I want. But, it rarely takes me less than half-an-hour's work to get there. My computer seems a tad more reliable than Bob's (I use it for work from home, so it has to be!), but I don't always want to go back in front of it after a heavy day's programming.
The question of permanence comes into it too - my printer is a couple of years old, and prints from it tend to fade when exposed to light within six months. I do _not_ want to have to spend right now on an upgrade when the printer is fine for most of my non-photographic colour printing. I think someone else had it right in another thread - digital media for the average non-photographer will be the standard when the CF card (or whatever) is essentially treated like film and handed in for processing, returned with a bunch of prints, and then used again for reprints. That's probably the way Joe Blow wants to handle it - no fuss and no technical skills involved. Until then, I suspect digital will follow the same loop as Polaroid did - at first everyone wanted one, then gradually it fell away as the cost and quality issues were realised. The issue of media standards arises too - who now uses 5.25 in floppies, can you read stuff stored on your original 20Mb hard disk from 1982, when did you last check that your backup tape can be restored from? Don't laugh, one major training organisation I worked with lost three months class records because no-one had checked that the tape backups were Ok. Will the digital camera you own now or buy tomorrow still be viable in two years time, never mind the probably more than ten for which most P&S owners will continue to expect to use them. I'll continue to shoot film for as long as I can buy the stuff - then Ill probably be too old to care anyway! John Coyle Brisbane, Australia On Thursday, July 25, 2002 4:52 PM, Bob Keefer [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: <SNIP>> > I really wonder whether the average home photographer really wants to > put that much energy into making pictures of the kids' birthday party. Or, > perhaps, does old-fashioned film have a lot safer future than we all > believe? > > Comments? > > Bob Keefer > - - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
